Highland Council visitor levy: large-scale consultation analysis with Diffley Partnership

When Highland Council needed independent analysis of one of Scotland's most significant visitor economy consultations, GoLLM worked alongside Diffley Partnership to deliver insight at a scale and speed that traditional methods alone could not match.

The Highland Council's statutory consultation on its proposed Visitor Levy Scheme ran from November 2024 to March 2025, a 12-week process that invited residents, businesses, community groups, and visitors to shape a policy with the potential to generate £10 million annually for the region's infrastructure and tourism services. The result was an exceptionally high volume of public engagement: over 4,000 respondents submitting more than 100,000 individual question responses. Analysing that body of evidence accurately, transparently, and within the council's timeline required both analytical rigour and the kind of processing capacity that only AI-assisted tooling can provide.

Working in collaboration with Diffley Partnership, GoLLM deployed its blended D.A.V.E. and human analyst approach combining the speed and consistency of AI-powered response analysis with the interpretive judgment of experienced research professionals. This methodology allowed the team to process the full dataset at scale while ensuring the nuance, context, and thematic depth that a consultation of this complexity demands. The resulting analysis fed directly into the independently commissioned report published by Highland Council, informing Members' deliberations on whether and how to proceed with implementation of the Visitor Levy Scheme.

This project reflects the kind of work GoLLM is built for: high-volume, high-stakes feedback analysis where accuracy and auditability matter as much as speed. For public sector bodies and research agencies handling large-scale engagement exercises, the blended approach offers a proven route to rigorous, timely, and cost-effective insight.

Diffley Partnership put it plainly: "Given the scale of the work and the timeline, there is no way we could have done this job without D.A.V.E."

That verdict, from an independent research firm with decades of experience in public consultation, is the clearest measure of what this collaboration delivered.

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